After Syria

In view of the former UN Secretary General’s conclusion that the war in Syria could expand throughout the Middle East, to which he has the usual very-polite but historically-ineffective UN-speak (yes, like Newspeak from 1984, but higher-brow), I produced a piece in direct response to the day’s news which incorporates the analysis of the past year on the Dead Sea as connected to the Mediterranean and Red Seas, with also the Wadi el Sirhan in Jordan, the Orontes River valley now in revolt, as it flows to Turkey and the often-imaged basin of the Arabian-Persian Gulf, which becomes an invitation for a greater Persian overview of the entire region, under its long-ago tradition of satrapies.

This is my op-ed on Syria, and it should be widely known.

In response to Kofi Annan, and in a necessary acceleration of historical process i.e., the UN is too slow.

If the valley of the Orontes, which flows north into Turkey, succeeds in its uprising, with a de facto ‘secession’ from Damascus-based Syria, then Damascus no longer has ground access to the Mediterranean coast. This includes the one Russian naval base in the Mediterranean, which is also a port visited by the one Chinese ship to enter the Mediterranean in friendship with resource-rich Africa. Thus, the Russian-Chinese pair in the UN Security Council want to keep Syria together, under a friendly regime. Thus, the other three on the UN Security Council, the maritime empires of France, the UK and the US, seek a Syria more under their control, and possibly even cut up. After all, two of them ‘created’ Syria when they broke up the Ottoman Empire into invadable chunks. And they talk about invading, or at least intervening, once again. When John McCain calls for ‘supporting’ the rebels with air attacks, as occurred in oil-rich Libya, he’s continuing the trajectory of Western colonialist history: this happens to not accord with the East.

Suggested that the entire Middle East, where water is precious, could promote for all the Middle East a grouping into river-basins rather than the Ottoman-Empire cut-offs designed by the French and British in WWI.

This would entail an end to “Syria.”

It would also entail an enlargement of Jordan as the East Bank, at least, of the Jordan River, pending through-flow from a wide catchment (including Damascus). And it would prevent what all the UN Security Council members have feared, in their attempt to keep a lid on the developing world: the long-sought union of Syria (in three main river basins and two ocean basins) with Egypt (in the most important river basin of the Middle East). If one is going to ‘support’ the rebels, why not emphasize that their centers of rebellion, in the Orontes valley, have nothing ecologically to do with Damascus?

That fighting in Syria spills over into Turkey and Syria is not bad. It’s good. It shows that the entire valley of the Orontes River can gain a fresh identity. Ecologically, it needs one anyway.

For Syria, if this happens, that’s the end: it no longer has access to the Mediterranean, and it can no longer be the host for the one base in that Sea which Russia has. Russia would be further reduced in geopolitical
reach.